Pun Salad

• Mandatory sexual harassment training will soon be coming to a University Near Here. Or so I've heard.

  Out in the People's Republic of California, it's the law. One professor at UC Irvine, Alexander McPherson, is refusing. Why?

  First of all, I believe the training is a disgraceful sham. As far as I can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed to relieve the university of liability in the case of lawsuits. I have not been shown any evidence that this training will discourage a harasser or aid in alerting the faculty to the presence of harassment.

  What's more, the state, acting through the university, is trying to coerce and bully me into doing something I find repugnant and offensive. I find it offensive not only because of the insinuations it carries and the potential stigma it implies, but also because I am being required to do it for political reasons. The fact is that there is a vocal political/cultural interest group promoting this silliness as part of a politically correct agenda that I don't particularly agree with.

  Your faithful blogger is way more gutless than Professor McPherson, and hence will meekly submit to the Fascist thought police indoctrination training. Might make fun of it though. They can't get me for that. Can they?

• Marc Sheppard looks at Obama's recent (taped) speech to the Governors Global Climate Summit and deems it "an arrogant concentration of misinformed alarmist hokum". Other than that, though, it was fine.

  Jacob Sullum also listened to the speech, and was also unimpressed. Obama, he writes,

  … continued trying to distract Americans from the enormous cost of making substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by promising "five million new green jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced." Not only is this number pulled out of thin air; it's nothing to be happy about. As I've noted, the manpower required to transform the economy so that greenhouse gas emission targets can be reached is a measure of the cost involved. Obama makes it seem as if we should try to maximize this cost, promising that green jobs will "steer our country out of this economic crisis."

  Sullum notes (as we have) that this is "pretty much the opposite of the truth." That's a very diplomatic wording.

• Due to various boneheaded domestic economic proposals, we've been quoting a lot of Bastiat lately. This sort of thing indicates that Bastiat-quoting may be a worldwide growth industry:
  Chinese candle exporters will be hit with extra charges when selling in Europe to punish some producers for selling below cost, the European Union said Saturday.

  For Bastiat fans, that's a big fish in a small barrel, and Vindico provides the gun. (Via Pejman.)

• Joel Achenbach is in Seattle and taking pictures. And one caption deserves a Pun Salad quote:
  If a bay falls into a gulf and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Reports the WaPo:

I have some prime suspects in mind. Starting with that guy in front: